The World System

The Earth’s climate is an energy system, it is complex and adaptive. Sunlight arrives from our star, some bounces back into the coldness of space, some of the energy is trapped in the atmosphere and some in the oceans. That’s a very basic picture. A better view is to see the Earth’s [read more]

Pub. 2003 Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England and Northampton, Massachusetts This book is, in my opinion, is one of the most important economic books published in the last few years. The title fails to hint at the explosive contents of the book and its price unfortunately puts it out of the reach [read more]

Large corporations are often vehicles for expressing the opinions and supporting the interests of their owners and senior executives. Although they are a key part of the operation of the global economic system, and have a legitimate interest in ensuring that legislation and government policy does [read more]

Some corporations have policies which actively encourage law-breaking, Enron was one example. Rowan Bosworth-Davies’s report on the 33rd Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime held at Jesus College, Cambridge in September 2015 “The Limits of the Law, The role of compliance in the [read more]

The original Bretton Woods settlement, by providing for fixed exchange rates and a link to gold imposed a degree of control over international financial exchanges, which were primarily mechanisms for facilitating international trade. With the development of the Eurodollar markets in London in the [read more]

In addition to the weakness of self-equilibrating mechanisms within the global monetary system, there is an arguably even more serious problem with underlying financial, trade and debt imbalances. In the words of the BIS, “Historically high debt levels and signs of financial imbalances point to [read more]

The levels of trust in legitimate corporations may be eroding as more individuals feel let down and abused, although many people want to believe that the supplier of their favourite electronic device is a loveable company that cares for them, but there is another part of the world of globalized [read more]

Crony capitalism is a term used where corporations have corrupt relationships with government officials and politicians in order to obtain an undue advantage over competitors, or to take over public assets for nominal or unfair prices. It has been frequently used to describe the form of capitalism [read more]

Students of international affairs, familiar with the Westphalian system, have been taught to see states as the paramount and only significant actors in the world, this is, however, not the case. Corporations, who operate globally, and with few restrictions, are also major players, in many cases [read more]

One measure of inequality is the Gini index, according to the World Bank, this measures the extent to which the distribution of income (or, in some cases, consumption expenditure) among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots [read more]